Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Lori D’Angelo writes about The Monsters Are Here from ELJ Editions.

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There’s a common misconception that when you’re writing fiction with non-realistic elements (often called speculative fiction) that you can just make up whatever you want, in other words that you don’t have to do research. 

While I suppose you could do that, I don’t think that the resulting work would be very interesting or believable. 

Instead, I think the opposite may be true. If you’re writing fiction where you have one foot in the magical and one foot in the real, you may actually have to do more research rather than less. 

My debut short story collection, The Monsters Are Here, (ELJ Editions, 2024) features stories of vampires, witches, werewolves and mermaids, but it also deals with social issues like addiction, racism, and domestic violence. 

I suppose that this leaves the reader with many questions, not only why write like this, but how. In some ways, the answer lies in my lived experience. 

I grew up and came of age in the 1990s. One of my Friday night rituals included watching The X-Files. Even after I went off to college, my dad continued taping the show for me, except on days when my sister (then in high school) took the tapes out to watch something else. So I watched nearly every episode, except the ones my sister accidentally (on purpose?) sabotaged. And it seems like those were almost always the second part of a two-part cliffhanger. 

So I was obsessively watching a paranormal drama series that contained both self-contained episodes (and those included some of my favorites like “Darkness Falls” and “Die Hand Verletzt”) and an ongoing and sometimes contradictory overarching mythology. Without knowing it then, that was all research. 

And when I went to write specific stories for this feminist literary sci-fi horror collection, I had to do even more research. For example, for example, in “The Expert Consultant from Amityville Gives Her Opinion on Your Second-Rate Haunted House,” which is only a 331-word story, I had to do research on which materials are commonly used for fake blood and which decorations are generally considered to be most creepy. When I first published that story, in the journal Wrong Turn Lit, it went through several rounds of edits to make sure the items mentioned were both super specific and hyper focused. 

But other research that I was doing came from the lived experience of my everyday jobs. While some of the stories in my collection are horror influenced (Think X-Files. Think Shirley Jackson.), others are more science-fiction influenced. One science fiction author whose work I love is Ray Bradbury. So for stories like “The Fixer,” what I wanted to do was use my experience (I had spent several years working in healthcare and attending life support trainings) to write a story about a character whose area of expertise was resuscitation, But rather than focusing on the resuscitation of humans, my character, Frank Zimmerman, focuses on the resuscitation of robots. For that story, the research involved looking up information like what might cause a mechanical failure in a machine and how could it be remedied. 

Another story, “Hot Dog from Heaven,” is a more surreal story. For that story, a family of picnickers is trying to save the earth from destruction by a large identified flying hot dog. So they draw on the knowledge of one sister, Mary, an amateur physicist. For that story, I was looking up laws of physics with the understanding that Mary, like me, is an amateur not an expert, but, in the event that a large hot dog does threaten to wipe out the earth, the knowledge of an amateur scientist could potentially come in handy. I mean, it’s better than nothing, right? 

Other research I drew on for this collection involved having a solid understanding of how the creatures (vampires, werewolves, witches) in my book are commonly portrayed in popular culture and then deciding whether to conform to or subvert those expectations. For example, the story “Mirror, Mirror” focuses on a protagonist who sometimes can’t see herself in the mirror, and I wondered what might be a plausible explanation for that other than that she was a vampire. I knew that was the most obvious conclusion that readers would jump to, so I wanted to demonstrate an awareness of that expectation while going in a different direction in that particular story. 

As for the other question why write this type of genre-bendy collection? Why now? The answer is that I wanted to deal with some really difficult subjects like overt hostility to immigrants in towns that rely on their labor but in a way that didn’t turn off the reader by being overly condescending or irritatingly moralizing. 

So, in the tradition of fabulists like Aimee Bender and Kelly Link, I told the stories of my monsters in a way that I hope was interesting, entertaining, and believable. And I asked the question: Who is most monstrous: the monsters or the humans? 

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Lori D’Angelo is a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation, a fellow at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and an alumna of the Community of Writers. She holds an MFA from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including BULL, Moon City Review, Reed Magazine, and Rejection Letters. Her first book, a feminist literary sci-fi horror collection, is being published by ELJ Editions on Halloween 2024. Find her on Twitter @sclly21 or at loridangelo.com.